Re: [PATCH v9 23/42] Documentation/x86: Add CET shadow stack description

["Edgecombe, Rick P" <rick.p.edgecombe@intel.com>]

On Fri, 2023-07-07 at 16:25 +0100, szabolcs.nagy@arm.com wrote:
> > Separate from all of this...now that all the constraints are
> > clearer,
> > if you have changed your mind on whether this series is ready,
> > could
> > you comment at the top of this thread something to that effect? I'm
> > imagining not many are reading so far down at this point.
> > 
> > For my part, I think we should go forward with what we have on the
> > kernel side, unless glibc/gcc developers would like to start by
> > deprecating the existing binaries. I just talked with HJ, and he
> > has
> > not changed his plans around this. If anyone else in that community
> > has
> > (Florian?), please speak up. But otherwise I think it's better to
> > start
> > getting real world feedback and grow based on that.
> > 
> 
> the x86 v1 abi tries to be compatible with existing unwinders.
> (are there other binaries that constrains v1? portable code
> should be fine as they rely on libc which we can still change)
> 
> i will have to discuss the arm plan with the arm kernel devs.
> the ugly bit i want to avoid on arm is to have to reimplement
> unwind and jump ops to make alt shadow stack work in a v2 abi.
> 
> i think the worse bit of the x86 v1 abi is that crash handlers
> don't work reliably (e.g. a crash on a tiny makecontext stack
> with the usual sigaltstack crash handler can unrecoverably fail
> during crash handling). i guess this can be somewhat mitigated
> by both linux and libc adding an extra page to the shadow stack
> size to guarantee that alt stack handlers with certain depth
> always work.

Some mails back, I listed the three things you might be asking for from
the kernel side and pointedly asked you to clarify. The only one you
still were wishing for up front was "Leave a token on switching to an
alt shadow stack."

But how you want to use this involves a lot of details for how glibc
will work (automatic shadow stack for sigaltstack, scan-restore-incssp,
etc). I think you first need to get the story straight with other libc
developers, otherwise this is just brainstorming. I'm not a glibc
contributor, so winning me over is only half the battle.

Only after that is settled do we get to the problem of the old libgcc
unwinders, and how it is a challenge to even add alt shadow stack given
glibc's plans and the existing binaries.

Once that is solved we are at the overflow problem, and the current
state of thinking on that is "i'm fairly sure this can be done (but
indeed complicated)".

So I think we are still missing any actionable requests that should
hold this up.

Is this a reasonable summary?